insisted on control of the authority. He also had plans to finance construction of a Marine Parkway and Marine Parkway Bridge to the Rockaways and of a Henry Hudson Bridge between the Bronx and Manhattan; the plans were to create two more authorities. He wanted control of them, too. LaGuardia dgreed to all these stipu- lations. \Vhen Moses suggested that he himself draft not only the bill con- solidating the park departments and settIng forth the powers he would pos- sess as New York City Parks Com- missioner but also bills establishing the two new authorities, LaGuardia saw no reason not to agree to that, too. They were among the first bills sub- mItted to the Lègislature by the La- Guardia administration. LaGuardia did not consider the au- thorit) appointments particularly sig- nificant, because he thought of public authorities as people had always thought of public authorities-as nothing more than toll-collecting agencies that would each build a single public work and go ou t of business as soon as its cost was paid off. But Moses had begun to think deeper. The public authonty was not a new devIce. The first of these entities, which resembled private corporatlons but wefe given powers previously reserved for governments-powers to construct pub- lic improvements and, in order to pay off the bonds they sold to finance the construction, to charge the public for the use of the improvements-had been created in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By the time Robert Moses went to Oxford University, in 1910, three and a half centuries later, th ere we re e i g h tee n hundred such entities in England, including the huge Port of Lon- don Authority (named "A.. u tho ri ty" because each of the clauses in the i\.ct of Parliament that spelled out ItS powers began with the words "Authority is here by given") and scores of highway- .... building boards, whose roads were named "t urn pi k e s," because they were blocked with horizontal bars, or "' k " h 1 d pI es, t at revo ve on pillars and would he turned aside to let a carriage pass only dfter a toll was paid. \ \fJ, ->, ->, ., " J But the public-authority concept was new in the United States. The Port of New York Authority, the first large authorit} in America, modelled on its London counterpart and created by an interstate compact between N ew York and New Jersey, was not set up un ti1 1 921, did not float its first bond issue until 1926, and did not become finan- cially successful until 1931-after it had, in 1930, following four vears of near fiscal disaster, persuaded the two stateS to let it take over the highly successful Holland Tunnel, which had been constructed by an independent commission It was not until the New Deal, when Reconstruction Finance Corporation and P ."I.A. grants were made available to Depression-strapped municipalities for self-liquidating pro j- ects, that urban authorities began to be widely established. In 1933 and 1934, when Moses was playing the crucial role in setting up not only the T ri- borough and the Marine Parkway Au- thorities but also the Bethpage, J one Beach, Henry Hudson, and Hayden Planetarium Authorittes, and was play- ing a lesser but still key role in the cre- ation of several other authorities, there were still only a few authorities in the entIre country. Almost every public authority cre- ated in the United States had con- formed to a single pattern: each had been created to construct and operate one, and only one, public improvement, a bridge or tunnel or sewer system; to issue only enough bonds to pay for the construction of that improvement, and only honds with a fixed expira- )' t ->, '> ., 1.' ^..,(. Ny.. S' . St"^ .iI I I r 11 f ,11 I " , ,'. '*' ,:_ J J -\ \Ì'l '*m ? \ .. i" , ut .. i '*', ".t; '<"-. '" " ....-..:.: ...". -0 ... 41 tion date; and, when that date ar- rived-or sooner, if revenue was col- lected faster than had been expected- to payoff the bonds, eliminate all tolls or fees, turn the improvement over to the city, and go out of existence. The Port Authority, empowered to con- struct and operate several improve- Inents, had become America's first mul- tipurpose public authority, hut each of its projects conformed to the traditiona] pattern, since each was financed by a separate bond issue and both the au- thority members and the public officials concerned expected that as soon as each issue was paid off the tolls on the facili- tv financed by that issue would be eliminated Motivated by the failure of several Port Authonty projects to earn enough to meet the interest and amorti- zation payments on their honds, Julius Henry Cohen, the authority's brilliant general counsel, was attempting in 1934 to hreak new ground by devising c1 new kind of bond and persuading bankers who held the authority's out- standing bonds to accept the new one in their place. Under the plan Cohen had In mind, the individual bond is- sues would be combined in to a sin glc general issue supported by the reve- nues from all Port Authority enter- prises-a move that would all 0 \\-T Llse of the Holland Tunnel surpluses to bail out such money losers as two of the au- thorit)'s bridges connecting Staten Is- land with New Jersey The new issue would be open-ended: should there bc an over-all surplus, the authority could use It to finance new projects. The bankclS refused to consider open-end .... , '---- f ':' J "0"'. .. .... ..." .. y ." *^ <"^ :'{ p J> 1\' 1 ' :', i\, t- ..,;"1-, , y---'" w.' >>- "", tÎ;,':: iM" ""!" .I:,o "'o(.-. x ' "Y ou know the type. Remembers only what he wants to remember." I I